John Eichenseer (a.k.a. JHNO)

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This year I spent some time in Istanbul, helping to produce the new TSU! album. Afterward, I traveled to Beirut and Armenia with Hraïr Hratchian to study duduk with Ararat Dallakyan. We played a concert together at the Église Saint-Merry in Paris!

There are new things in the pike, but meanwhile have a look around and enjoy the music.

jhno

You can now download Spool3 in whatever format you like for free. I think that everything I have released online is free now, somewhere. If you are looking for something and can’t find it, let me know (via facebook, or contact link)… enjoy.

TSU! just released their second album. It’s amazing… I play on a couple of tracks.

This is one of my favorite projects – good mellow listening mood music.

We worked really hard on this record, and the work paid off. BOY was released in March and has received rave reviews from around the world… it is a landmark testament to Carla’s songwriting talent and a tour-de-force of recording possibilities from everyone involved.

Here are some of the heavy tones I like to make on the viola.
Recorded live at Montalvo, 2012…

By the way, here is a short excerpt from the concert I played as part of Pamela Z’s ROOM series. I was heckled off the stage by Bernard Zaslav, a famous classical violist. Just google “violagate” if you want the gory details.

This excerpt is just for the record, so you can hear what kind of music it was, and a tiny piece of the heckling, too.

Around the turn of the millenium, I was using a giant MaxMSP patch to play live shows – including improvised music with a couple of bands (including CRATER), and solo DJ type stuff. David Zicarelli suggested we try to make a commercial product out of it, and a few years later Cycling ’74 released radiaL.

It was a great pleasure to hear the music and sound that people made with radiaL – things that they never could have made without it.

radiaL was also a big experiment, to see if it was possible to make a ‘real’ software product out of a Max patch… it succeeded in the end, but it took a LOT of work. Nowadays the whole process is a bit easier, and there are a bunch of amazing projects made in MaxMSP.

Anyway, radiaL is no longer available – but if you want to read what it was about, here is my favorite review of radiaL, from Sound On Sound magazine.

I have been playing with Evangeslista since 2010 or so… in 2011 we made this record, released by the Montreal-based label, Constellation.

Here’s a review excerpt from Amazon:

“And the trains pass through different platforms where someone wants to show what is lost but not gone, what is in shreds but not burned to ashes, this is intimacy asking for a ticket and entering this life, this moment in the shape of music so generous it feels like it is dreaming about itself while it is moving along, the sources are definitely natural, wild and untamed, an essential humanity reaching for its potential and achieving it, then giving it away as this gift of energy, this music.”

cellsound: audio cellular automata

cellsound generates sound based on a cellular automata algorithm.
the rule is: move toward a harmonious relationship with your neighbor.
in this way, cellsound creates a unique and beautiful sound…

When I started working for Cycling ’74 in 1998, the first product we made together was Pluggo – a collection of highly unusual, creative, and useful plug-ins. Our concept was, 74 plug-ins for $74. At the time, this was a pretty radical step, as was our technique for creating the plug-ins: we wrote them in Max/MSP. I wrote over 30 of the original collection. We had a good time.

Pluggo has been replaced by Max4Live, currently available from Cycling ’74. But as I travel through recording studios and bedroom musicians in strange corners of the world, I am often surprise to hear that Pluggo was known and loved by musicians and sound tinkerers everywhere.

Feedback Network

Feedback Network is, to my mind, almost the perfect example of the kind of thing Pluggo excels at. It features a dozen or so sliders, half of which move randomly of their own accord. It has a large Randomize button, which doesn’t do quite what you expect it to, and no amount of familiarity with conventional effects processors will give you the faintest idea what to expect when you pass a signal through it. With the dry level slider turned down, in fact, the input signal is almost irrelevant, as you won’t hear much resembling it in Feedback Network’s output. Instead, what you get is a largely unpredictable, slowly evolving textural mass of feedback and associated noise, suggestive of old science-fiction movie soundtracks and half-remembered nightmares.

One fine winter in Istanbul, Carla Bozulich and I helped my good friend James Hakan Dedeoğlu record some songs he had written – mainly for solo guitar. I loved the songs – minimal yet constantly interesting, with a subtle Turkish vibe coming through now and again.

These songs are now available as the first TSU! album. I play some viola textures on the first track.

Having spent some time in Italy recently, I want to link to some of the extraordinary musicians I have met and played with there…

First the cellists, who have played with Evangelista and have made their own solo records:

Italians have a kind of friendly, open energy that is like nowhere else.

And – perhaps – a tendency for extreme and dramatic art. Check it out…

I really love this record by Blue Willa –>

I played a piano part on one track, and helped a very little bit with the mixing – in Dharamshala, India – ! After hearing the album many many times, it was a real peak experience to finally see the band live – opening for Evangelista in Switzerland. They played every song on the album, my favorite show of the year.

The Italian photographer Pamela Maddelano shot a documentary about the making of this album, it’s quite fun to watch and sheds some interesting light on what it is like to make a record these days: